Hmm. It's disheartening to hear this kind of reaction from so many people. I wanted to get this game, being a Zelda nut and all, but so many people on this board and on other sites have said that it's no different than the other 2D Zeldas, and that would be a sin for a Zelda game. I see no reason to not believe these comments, though, since it's not made by EAD but by a team whose games I have never played. So what do you think, should I not get it?

It's not a bad game, it's just...unremarkable. (Which, for a Zelda game, is very remarkable, I guess.) It occurred to me earlier tonight that one of the most disappointing things about the game is that it really doesn't exploit its central "gimmick" to the fullest. "Shrinking" and "Growing" are mostly just used to access new areas...to get to the other side of a wall, for example. The environment doesn't scale (this IS just the GBA, of course), so when you shrink you are playing on the exactly same screens as when you are big. When you enter a new room while shrunk, the screen changes, and you appear normal sized. Sure, there are big acorns about, but the gameplay is unchanged.

Basically, when you are small, it doesn't matter that you are small. The gimmick is irrelevant!

There are maybe two clever boss fights where you can shrink down and sneak inside the boss, but that's about it. The rest of the time, shrinking is used to access blocked off areas...it's no different that unlocking a door with a key.

We've seen that scalable environments are viable (Katamari Damacy being the best example); perhaps the Minish Cap and its gimmick should have been saved for a console Zelda instead, where it could have been exploited to its fullest potential.